No One App Should Have All That Power By David Williams (he/him)
Social media has become one of the biggest disrupting forces democracy has met in the 21st century. David Williams investigates its consequences, good and bad. Ten years ago, the Arab Spring was in full bloom. People across the MENA (Middle East, North Africa) were revolting against authoritarian governments and demanding greater democratic rights. This time, protesters used a tool never before seen in revolutions: social media. They used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to mobilise people and spread their cause. These platforms were helpful because they evaded government censors while also quickly dispersing information. Social media was seen as a great democratising force that could chip away at the control authoritarians had on the countries' press. Moreover, the movements organised on social media had real political impacts.
#BlackLivesMatter. It has now become a rallying call under which protesters and activists fight against police brutality and racial inequality. MeToo was first coined in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke. However, #MeToo reached mainstream popularity in 2017 with Harvey Weinstein.
The revolution that sparked the Arab Spring was in Tunisia. Street protests – organised on social media – led to the Tunisian president stepping down and allowing for parliamentary elections in the country for the first time in 24 years. But, the democratising abilities of social media were not just limited to the Arab Spring.
In the past, politicians who wished to stop the spread of information could simply ban it. However, they can now just as easily spread their own narrative. This muddies the water, confuses people, and leads them into echo chambers. With the speed by which information spreads across social media, traditional media struggles to keep up. By the time the information can be proven false, the damage is already done; the narrative has taken hold and supporters will not believe otherwise. A 2018 MIT study found
The term Black Lives Matter is credited to Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in 2013. This phrase soon turned into the trending hashtag
Social media is a promising tool to mobilise activists and spread progressive messages. However, the democratising power of social media can also bring dark forces to the surface. While politicians saw that social media could spread information holding them to account, they soon realised it could also be utilised to spread whatever information they want – whether that information is true or not.
1 nytimes.com/2018/03/08/technology/twitter-fake-news-research.html 2 nytimes.com/2020/11/23/technology/election-misinformation-facebook-twitter.html 3 theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-2020-election-poll-trump-biden
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that “True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people.”1 Anti-democratic forces take advantage of this phenomenon to spread misinformation that undermines democracy. The relentless Republican propaganda that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump spread like wildfire across social media following the 2020 American election. According to a New York Times report, “Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions – including likes, comments and shares – on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3.”2 Even six months later, according to a Reuters poll, “The 17–19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the 'true president'."3 While not producing this content, social media companies provided the ideal platform on which such information could find an audience. The heads of these companies, meanwhile, didn’t care. When testifying before Congress in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said “Our policy is that we do not fact-check politicians’ speech. And the reason for
